Last night while watching a mindless episode of tosh.0 with my family I grabbed my MacBook and wrote the previous post Watch Your Thoughts. It took about 20 minutes and about half my attention was devoted to writing the post.
You don’t know what will resonate. I stopped thinking and started writing the post. I didn’t really realize what I had done until this morning when I sat with my friend Phil Gerbyshak and discussed the success the post was enjoying in the retweet universe. During the discussion he said multiple times just “ship it baby!”
The ideas don’t always have to be new. Nothing in Watch Your Thoughts was new. I just added mine and my wife’s real life perspective to something we all already know and repackaged it. In reminding myself I reminded all of you and that resonated. Once I started typing that post I stopped thinking, which considering half my brain was watching tosh.0 makes sense. Without even realizing it I took Phil’s advice to ship it baby!
Lots of “ship it baby” can be repackaging. I’m starting to copy some of my more popular printing related posts from this blog to the ColorMetrix blog. While I am not re-writing the posts I am revising and updating them. Until this morning I didn’t see this activity as fitting the ship it baby mentality but it does. A revised post cross linked to an original post does good things with Google, if you do it right.
Just do what comes naturally. The two more surprising successes I have had in the video world happened by accident. First, I filmed a bunch of Fit Milwaukee runners at an indoor marathon earlier this year. I combined all the footage into a mashup that was then viewed several hundred times. I was just making a video for friends. More recently I shot some video of FourSquare fun being had by a group of Milwaukee folks headed to the SXSW conference. The video has been watched more than 5000 times. In neither case was I trying to make a video to be watched by the masses. I was having fun filming friends.
It’s like when you are single and don’t want to be. The moment you throw you hands up and give up, you meet “that person.” Seems to me my best published works come when I least expect it.
Are your experiences similar? Jump in let me know what you think.
See Jim – you are catching on! Writing what comes to mind and writing with passion bring people to your blog and make them want to know more about you. You just need to let go and ship it!
Too many people get hung up on the proper form and jargon used in their blog posts but they will either speak above their reader's heads or make their readers feel like dummies. When you speak as a real person and with the passion that comes naturally, people want to know more about you and listen closely to what you have to say.
That is how you build long-standing relationships. That's how you succeed!
Excellent post, Jim. I will be having my staff read this when I get in. It will be great motivation for them as they begin their weekly article assignments. Thanks!
Make sure to have them read Shannon's comment as well. She makes several very good points in her second paragraph. Good luck with the new blog. So cool to have another printing industry blog firing up!
I wish Disqus has a “Love” button. Your second paragraph just rocks Shannon.